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Link Policy

I thought now was a good time to repost my old post on the subject, especially since I suspect that many other bloggers have similar preferences to these. I also add a new item (#3):

We sometimes get e-mail from people asking us to link to their blogs, or their posts.

We actually very rarely add new blogs to the blogroll, which is already pretty long; perhaps this is a mistake, but that’s our tentative approach to this. But we’re always happy to consider linking to interesting posts on other people’s blogs. Three brief reminders about what tends to make this process easier for us (reminders to which I’ll link from a permanent “Linking policy” link that I’ll be adding to the front page):

1. Pitch the post, not the blog. If you have a post that you think we and our readers will find especially interesting, let us know about that — such custom-selected posts are generally more tempting than just a suggestion to read whatever happens to be on the front page of some blog.

2. Include both (a) the text of the post and (b) the URL of that particular post as part of the text of the e-mail. When we’re working remotely, often on slowish connections, this makes it much easier for us to read the post — and thus much more likely that we will read it and consider linking to it.

3. Target the right Conspirator. Send the post to the particular blogger who you think will find it most interesting, not just to me. You might think that I’d forward the post to whoever I think will find it potentially appealing; but I’m often reluctant to do that, since I don’t want my cobloggers to feel pressured by me to blog about matters. (Not that they should feel pressured even if I do post something, but there’s always the risk of some slight tendency in that direction whenever a friend and coauthor passes something along.) So target the right person on the blog.

As I mentioned, I suspect many other bloggers have the same views, though I can’t be sure about that.